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Science 10 October 1997:
Vol. 278. no. 5336, p. 224
DOI: 10.1126/science.278.5336.224
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Research News

MATHEMATICS:
Fractions to Make an Egyptian Scribe Blanch

Dana Mackenzie

Over 3500 years ago, Egyptians wrote fractions as sums of the reciprocals of whole numbers, using as few numbers as possible and always avoiding repetition, giving exact results with a surprising economy of notation. Now, two mathematicians have gone to the opposite extreme by asking how densely spaced the terms in an Egyptian fraction can get and thereby showing how run-of-the-mill numbers can be expressed as surprisingly sprawling fractions.

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Science. ISSN 0036-8075 (print), 1095-9203 (online)